Before Halloween, I had had the bright idea that we needed spooky cookies with sugar eyeballs. Sugar eyeballs were purchased and then sat unused as October was frittered away with activity after fun activity. And that’s the story of how we had Guy Fawkes Day spooky eyeball cookies instead! (Remember, remember, the 5th of November.)

Candy eyeballs are awesome

The kids finished out their soccer seasons and at least Ian got to celebrate with an end-of-season meet up at Hat Creek Burgers. Maya’s last game was pretty amazing. The team played really well together, and Maya herself was more focused and involved than her norm. It was a lot of fun to watch.

Maya is holding the team’s mascot, the Octo-corgi

We tried to make a fancy punch that needed oleo-saccharum as an ingredient. Making the oleo-saccharum worked as advertised, and the punch was tasty, though I’m not sure it was entirely worth the fuss. We have this hot gin punch that I honestly prefer (thank you, Holly), and it’s delicious hot or cold, so I’m inclined to make it instead.

First soccer season!

I did try to use my mini bundt pan to make large citrus ice cubes for floating in the punch bowl. The were pretty to look at and didn’t inordinately dilute the punch, so I think we’ll call it a win.

The kids are endlessly entertained by the notion that the squirrels are better gardeners than I am. Those creatures stay very busy planting corn and sunflowers from the bird feeders all over the yard. This year they even used my flower pots, and to show for it, I had a bold and lovely yellow sunflower towering over one of them. Well done, squirrels!

Petting the bunny at Dolphinfest

The kids had their annual Dolphinfest carnival around the middle of the month. This year we delighted in the fact that we could send the kids off to play on their own and just report back periodically. It was awesome. Sean and I could just kind of linger around and chitchat while the kids used their tickets however they chose. Maya’s preference was to play a softball toss game where she knocked over targets and got to choose a stuffed animal from the prize wall. Ian seemed to prefer the various bouncy houses that he could run and jump and slide in. There was even a small petting zoo at the carnival this year! Ian was sad there were no reptiles there.

Happy 10th birthday!

This year marks the post-COVID return of birthday parties. Maya’s birthday party was the day after Dolphinfest. She and her classmates gathered up at Pinballz arcade and played games, ate pizza, and drank soda to their hearts’ content. I was caught entirely off guard at how much fourth graders eat … and fast! We should almost certainly have ordered more pizza than we did. Either way, Maya loved her party and seems thrilled that so many of her classmates came to celebrate with her.

This girl is happy w her giant plate of shrimp

We had Maya’s birthday dinner on the 18th. She wanted to have fried shrimp at Pappadeaux, and so that’s what we did.

The very next day, we flew to Salt Lake City for our Moab vacation.This is one of the many things that we had to cancel in 2020, and I’m sad we put it off for so long. What a great trip!  As has become our habit, I’ve written a whole separate post on this vacation so I could yammer on for as long as I wanted and not belabor this post with those details.

Move over Clark Griswold – no windows were broken when we cut the rope to release the branches

We flew back into town on the 25th and right away on the 26th, we went out to find this year’s Christmas tree. They tell you not to fall in love with a house when you’re house hunting. They should tell you the same thing about Christmas trees. We went home with the biggest tree we’ve ever purchased – I think it was in the 10-11′ tall category. You should have seen the two of us trying to wrangle it into the house! It is lovely and glorious, and probably we won’t do that ever again. I shudder to think what it’s gonna be like getting the tree out of the house when its all dried out after the holidays.

We gotta stop meeting like this

And then Ian, who had just managed to survive a week’s worth of hikes in the Utah high desert unscathed, managed to cut his head open at school at the end of the month. Apparently there was a collision with another kid during recess that culminated in Ian’s head smacking into a piece of playground equipment. We went to an urgent care place instead of the children’s ER we had taken him to last time, and this was probably a mistake. They glued a wound that maybe ought to have been sutured, and they weren’t really able to manage his pain and anxiety very well. Lesson learned. The Dermabond stuff came off after only a couple days and what had been described to us as a 1 cm laceration was really more like a 1-inch laceration, and could have been longer. The cut was right along his hairline, and now you really even don’t see that it’s there unless you’re looking for it.

So there you go – that was November. I’m finally writing this as we’re right up against Christmas, so I’m *sure* I have all my details straight.